144. Design Better With AI With Jackie & Matt

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I don't know if you've ever used an AI tool for any type of design. The problem with it is it may look great, but it's not realistic.

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt, and today I'm joined by Jackie and Matt Mosher from Designly. How you doing, guys?

Great. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, great, Will, thank you.

No worries. Matt, let's start with you. What is Designly?

Designly is a exterior design platform. So essentially a platform that connects builders, homeowners and other professionals to everything exterior design, from renderings to the actual architecture to quantity takeoffs and things like that.

Very cool. Yeah, I stumbled across what you guys are doing and really excited to hear more about what that is and how you're helping residential builders because I know you help consumers as well as the residential builders, which is our primary audience. Jackie, maybe I'll pass across to you. What inspired you to come up with Designly and start the company?

Well, well, it really started out of a need to be a visual tool for Matt's clients. And it just really took off from there. We saw not only, you know, did his clients really need it, but then the word of mouth and it was, you know, everybody was very receptive and it was just caught on, so it just turned into so much more.

That's a good point. Maybe we should take a step back. Matt. Matt, you've been in the industry for over 20 years. I understand. Do you want to give a bit of a background on that?

Absolutely. So I, I started my company when I was, my first company, when I was 17 and it was in the landscape construction space, at least I called it that. I don't think I knew what I was doing then, but I, I was officially in business so, you know, always, always being a bit of a visionary. Things progressed pretty rapidly from there. And in my mid-20s, I was doing some pretty substantial projects, both in the landscape construction world and then, you know, basically high end residential home building type applications and over the years, I always. I was always interested in staying on the forefront of technology. I had an appreciation for technology, although it wasn't that advanced. When I was younger, I could see that what was coming. And so, you know, one of the first things that I did is being a young guy, I was oftentimes competing with these older gentlemen and ladies that had a lot of experience. And so I'd show up and the client would think that they had the wrong person at the house because I had such a baby face. But I said, nope, I'm. I'm. I'm at Mosier, and it's my company. So, you know, I would always get the. The hesitation from the client. So I said, all right, you know, some of the things. What. What can I do to. To kind of beat my competition? Being a younger person compared to people that are a little bit more seasoned. And one of the things and, you know, know, the last 10 years is, you know, if I could come up with a way to vis. For people to visualize their project. You know, people will sit there and look at a plan, and they will, you know, pretend like they understand what that plan is going to look like. But once their house is built or any component is built, they go, wow. I. I didn't realize it was going to look like that. Right, so. So, yeah, so that's how I got into it. You know, I. I got some young. Young people that came, and I paid them literally to learn how to do renderings. And I started to see that my clients were just totally in awe of not only what we had put together, but the architect for the house. So they'd been working with an architect for months and months, unable to fully visualize what their house going to look like. And then we would show them a rendering, and they would go back to the architect, say, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize it was going to look like this. So that's how it all started. And as we went along with that, I started to really, my business just quadruple. I mean, it literally quadrupled just from that. Everybody wanted to use me because I could show them these beautiful designs in a visual manner. And so Jackie and I were on a plane one day, and, you know, she said, you know, we should really do something for the masses. Meaning, you know, all the builders out there, you know, anybody in the industry that needs help with this stuff. And that's how we started Design League. And the rest is sort of history up to this point.

How does it factor into accurate costing? Because one Challenge I know many builders have faced before is a consumer might want to build a house. They go to an architect, they get something designed, and then they come to the builder. And it's very mismatched between what they expecting the cost would be and what the actual design is. How does your software and your experience kind of play into that?

Well, one of the things we're doing, and Jackie can elaborate more, is twofold, is using AI to first of all, be able to instantly measure the facades of the house. Right. So within a millisecond, be able to say, okay, there's X amount of, you know, this material. X amount of this material. And then what we're working on. So. So that AI is getting pretty darn good on our end. We can. We can identify areas of a house very accurately and get an estimate of the quantities. The next thing that we're working on is how do we, you know, sort of attach prices to those quantities based on the markets that we're in. So right now we're all over the United States, obviously every market throughout the country and across the world you're in Australia is a little different. So we're working on methods such as using, like, insurance practices. Right. Where they have an estimator to be able to pin more accurate pricing to those quantities. So that part is definitely evolving. But we, you know, continue to get better, and we think pretty soon we'll be pretty darn accurate on price pricing for really any market that you're in.

Yeah. Jackie, do you want to expand on how builders actually go about using designly as well? Like, if I came up to you as. As a new builder that didn't know much about you, what would be the process?

Sure. Well, it's. It's super easy. We have it set up so that you have access to this really, you know, little suite of tools like your own little tool belt and professionals if you needed assistance. But we also have it set up so that you can do everything online. You can easily see what you need to do. You click it, that's where. And then the website just takes you next up, next step. So really, you know, for a builder, I would say their first start is to show their clients. So they would most likely want to build a 3D model. And after that, if there's, you know, we've had them come through, and again, the client says, oh, I didn't know it was going to look like that, or the slope of the roof or something. So then, then they want to access their architect. The lead time is you know, super long and they want to see something pretty quick. So they'll access our in house architect to propose a new way to solve this problem. And then, you know, we can mock that up for em in a realistic perspective, go ahead with all of the, you know, colors, materials and, you know, from there. And then after they finish that, it's not even just about the colors and materials. A builder member has access to a suite of tools and services that a typical homeowner doesn't. So let's say they want a rear yard design. Their client's interested in a pool or maybe not straight away, but down the road. So there's a lot that we offer and that we can do for the builder member.

Yeah.

Cool.

I mean, I'm interested to learn more about how your tool also uses AI. Matt, you mentioned it before, and it's a bit of a, I guess a buzzword at the moment in the industry or across any industry. But what does that actually look like? Is it helping just from the design aspects or is it helping with material selections and things like that?

Well, to your point, Will, I think everybody's trying to incorporate the word AI into every, you know, their business right now just to try to kind of keep up with the trend or the forward movement. But really, you know, we realized that using artificial intelligence was going to be important from the day we started this company, which was well before the buzzword became popular. So there's two things on the design side of things. We're firm believers in that that that design should still include a professional human touch. In that, at least that holds true for now, is that people want to know that a professional looked at something and, and okay, those materials specified actually will work in that climate. Those are available. Whereas like a true AI design on the design side might give you a pretty picture, but it might not work on the cladding of your house. You know, there's a number of factors. So that's. Number one is we're using AI to assist designers to do things faster. So what I mean by that is they're able to. The house is, is our AI is able to identify every component of the house on the design side of things. They can then apply materials and colors to that part of the house instantly rather than trying to do mood boards and things like that. Once the design part's done, then becomes the. The nuts and bolts of it is, okay, how much does this cost and how do we build it? Right? So on that side of things, we're constantly improving our AI. We have an entire team that works on this to be able to identify all the components of the house and do what I was saying earlier, which is, okay, what are the quantities there? What are all the other components that are needed to actually execute this? So doing things that traditionally would take somebody a long time to manually do takeoffs or do on site measurements and eliminating that. So we're using it in a number of different ways, essentially just trying to make everything faster, more efficient and more accurate.

But on the design side, as far as AI, you know, we're currently, you know, AI is. It's. A machine learns the more you feed it, the more you feed it, and that's all it wants, is data. But as far as the design side, yeah, we have humans that are actually it. But our AI machine is learning to let say somebody really selected this and saved this combination. It's learning that you may also really love this color. Because you love this, you may actually be open to integrating wood into the exterior. Does that make sense? And that does not require the actual work of a human designer. The human designer got the, you know, car going down the tracks, but that's where the AI machine is involved, I guess, in design, if that makes sense. It can suggest and all of that, but it, we don't ever use it just to pop out, you know, designs. And there's a couple reasons for that. I don't know if you've ever used an AI tool for any type of design. I mean, I'm sure, you know, there's tons, you know, chat GBT for like a, A design, whether you did your room or yourself or a person or cartoons, whatever it is. The problem with it is, is that it is, it's. It may look great, but it's not realistic. And the great part about designly is, is we only alter the areas that you want to change. So if you say, I'm not open to changing my roof, your roof is, is. It is as it actually is in the photograph. We don't alter the lighting, we don't do any of that. And the reason for that is, is because it ensures that the cladding, colors or other components that we are proposing are going to go perfectly with your roof as is. Does that make sense? There's a lot of rendering companies and they give you this beautiful picture, but they're altering it. They're able to put these filters and all that. We don't do that.

It.

You know what I mean? It is what it is. And our designers work off of what you have and we make sure. That if you were going to go out and do this tomorrow and use what we said, it's going to look just like this.

Yeah.

On a very simplistic level, I remember we were using a. We created a bunch of images for marketing of like, of houses and things like that, and just really simple things like they were missing a front door. There was no way, like AI generated images, you know, and I can imagine at a design level. Yeah. There's just those subtle things which are, to your point, not realistic.

No, they're not. And that's where. That's. That's why people are coming to us, because they're. They truly, they're ready and they're ready right now. They're not, you know, just playing around and just wanting to see. They. They are very serious. They. They want to. Their home exterior.

But to your audience, Will, which is residential builders, is, you know, if we can cut out the need to sit down and do takeoffs on plans, if we can cut out the need to, you know, visit a house that you're doing a renovation on and take hand measurements, all these little things that are an hour here, an hour there of your day, we can allow these builders to focus on what's important, which is building the houses and focusing on doing that, not. Not all the ancillary things.

Yeah. How much time do you think you are saving builders during that build process or the design and build process?

Well, I mean, I think it depends on the project, obviously. But, you know, if you think of, if you think of the time it takes to. To have your initial meeting with the client and kind of discuss it and then take hand measurements of the areas, that's quite a bit of time. Once your client gets to material selections, if you don't have to be the one sitting in those meetings and you can let design lead do it with your design team, you know that that's a significant amount of time. You know, once you get to actual finished modeling of the house, instead of having to sit there and print out blueprints and do hand takeoffs, that's a tremendous amount of time. So, you know, the answer is, I think in a spectrum of hours. But it's. It's a lot of time, especially on a larger project, that we can save.

A builder, and especially when the homeowner actually sees it. I can't tell you how many times this has happened and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, whether it be that portico, it's actually going to be too large, or we need to make it and so we're able to do these, you know, subtle changes almost instantly versus waiting to get a hold of their architect to make them, propose them, draw them up. That's weeks or days. And so. And then they may say, no, actually, we'll go with what it is, but for the minimal cost it is, they want to see it. And they were able to do that. And instantly.

How specific is the material selection? Is it. Is it like, based on actual suppliers and the, the grading of the product and everything?

Absolutely. It's all specs are included, so it's the manufacturer, the color, everything if you wanted to go and purchase it tomorrow. And, you know, with that, it's, you know, not every product is available in every area in every region. You know, we do our best to know, you know, what those are and what is available and what isn't. But also, again, as we're set up, you know, the more information, the better, you know, so.

So do you have specific suppliers that you recommend through the process or is it just like, could someone come with their own, you know, our preferences?

Absolutely. Oh, yeah, somebody could come and. And somebody could come and this happens a lot too. They say, I have this custom. I'm having this custom door made, or I'm having. It could totally be custom and if we can get a picture, I can get, you know, a production designer to actually make that swatch and we can get that on their house, so. Oh, totally. No, there's, you know, companies that do custom work or whatever. Absolutely. A client can come with. Come to us with anything and we can put it on your house.

Yeah, builder can come with any, any brands that they like to work with.

Yeah.

So anyway. Yeah, totally specific.

Cool. So I guess what I'm under. Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like there's a human touch throughout the process, like, which is just assisted with AI technology and other software, which is just accelerating the process of the. The design and build. Is that right?

Yeah, correct.

We think it's important, you know, we're, at least for now, we think it's important. Right. Is. Is we're on the. We're on the kind of the beginning strokes of this whole AI movement. And I'm not sure that people fully trust it. Right. Are you going to trust AI and your client's home to do everything? I don't think it's quite there yet. So that's why we have a philosophy that we make sure that human touch touches everything throughout the process, but speeds it up by a hundred times, which allows for quicker turnarounds and naturally lower prices. Now in the future, will that change? It might, right? It might. But right now we think that's important to keep a human touch.

Yeah, I think people will appreciate that certainly at this point in the AI journey, to your point, there's a little bit of a lack of trust still around the effectiveness, especially when you're building a home or something like that.

Yeah, as there should be.

You know.

But it's advancing quickly.

You mentioned Jackie and my understanding of AI as well. It's historical data essentially, which is making the decisions of the machine. How do you then factor in like up to date trends and things like that into the designs and the material selections?

Well, that is truly the more you see, the more you learn. And so in this day and age with, you know, social media, TikTok, I mean, online presence, Pinterest, you can just, it's, I encourage all the designers to just take a minute, take a cruise, see what's going on. Flipping through magazines, you know, we have a channel that's just dedicated, you know, on Slack, that's just uploading just a picture. You see it, you're driving by a house or anything, you're like, oh, we gotta track that material down. We have to. So it truly and also too, you know, with, with, you know, we have a handful of younger designers and younger professionals are not, they do not have ingrained in them this way. They've been working for 20 something years. You know what I mean? Everything is exciting, everything is new and everything's a possibility. And so that paired, you know, with, you know, an amazing collaboration with the seasoned professionals is just like, it's, it's such a good partnership, you know. So again, it's just the more you see, I mean, I see I come across and we have, you know, companies that reach out to us and want to know, hey, how can we be a part and blah, blah. And you know, I have meetings and I go through their products and I'm like, wow, this is really great. Like I've, I've never seen it before, you know, because they're just a small little, you know, nugget trying to break out there. So again, it's, there is no one resource that you can go to and be like, every single cladding material will be in here. Right? There's nothing. So you just, it's just up to your job as a professional and you know, designers and, and mine as a leader to just keep us on the forefront.

And I, and I think part of your question was how does, how does the machine learn those trends besides humans? Right. So the one thing that, that we do is as we, as we input new designs in material, the machine is starting to see that trend happening. Right. So that it's. The AI is being trained to say, okay, there's a lot of board and batten that's being shown, or there's a lot of this color tones and things like that. But to Jackie's point, you know, right now it starts with humans inputting and creating these designs, and then the AI being trained to pick up on those subtle cues in those designs between hundreds and thousands of designs. So it's a, it's a process that, that we as humans have to work and give the machine the material to, to get there with, you know, what it needs to learn.

Yeah, it just makes a lot of sense. There's no point in doing so much manual work if you can accelerate that process with, with, oh, yeah, technology.

Absolutely, absolutely. As soon as you get them, you know, where they're comfortable and like, okay, yeah, this is great. And then that's where, you know, the human can step back a little bit. You know, you hand it over to the client who then is, you know, being recommended certain colors and materials by the AI that just knows that, because a person that likes this, genuinely likes this. You have a wood detail, you know, in your eaves. You might be interested in, you know, a wooden header over your window or. You know what I mean? There's just. It, it's. It's sort of endless. So. Yeah, yeah.

So how do you, how does designly integrate with other software that builders would be using for, like, construction management software or things like that, which they're using throughout the whole build process?

We, we, we don't have any direct integration at this point with outside softwares. Really what we're trying to pioneer is just the efficiency of getting from idea to reality from a construction design standpoint to build. So one of the things that we're looking at as we take, as we hit each milestone is what, what makes sense from an integration standpoint with different APIs and different things with this software. So we're, we're a little bit premature on actual integrations with other software, but it's something that, you know, it's, it's in our cue to be paying attention to.

It's a tricky one because there's so many construction softwares out there. So, like, if you tried to, you know, integrate with all of them, that's going to be a pretty lengthy process.

Oh, Absolutely. And that's the thing. There's no. There's no black and white answer to how to get a rendering or a 3D model or anything done. There's so many, and everyone does, you know, different.

So we're.

Instead of going and trying to appeal to every. In this, we definitely are staying focused. But I will say that, you know, we do listen to the masses and to where our clients are. Hey, hey, hey, you know, if we get. If we get enough, we have a meeting and we decide and we talk about, okay, let's say, you know, we have enough. Should we, you know, build this to make this work? Or if not. But other than that, we've got a really good thing going. So we just. We're staying pretty focused that way.

We're really good at taking a house, whether it's a picture or a plan, getting the builder and the client through all the material selection, the validation of what's going to go where, the quantities that are needed. And that's what we're really focused on right now. Because if we can get people from that point, which so many clients have such a hard time deciding, oh, man, do I go to that stone or do I this or this or this? We can get over that hurdle. The rest is pretty easy, you know, so that's really what we're highly focused on right now, is creating a solution that significantly lessens the time to get from plan view to realistic view to quantities.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's just, you're staying really focused and just making sure that you can help save time essentially through that whole design process. What's the future look like for designly? What's happening next 12, 18 months and beyond?

Well, you know, we want to be known as the resource for exterior design and implementation. So whereas a lot of, you know, going back to builder software and things like that, it's, you know, it's a lot of. Most of it's geared more toward organization and, you know, project flow and things like that. We want to be known where designly is kind of where you go to start your project, to get the ball moving, to get the energy going with the client, to get the visuals. And so that's really what we're focused on. And we're focused on not only doing that for builders and homeowners, but also we have some big things in the work for realtors, distributors, things like that. So if we can create this whole network to where, you know, Realtor comes through with a new listing and we have builders that are members client buys a house. Realtor came through designly with some different ideas for the listing. Now we can pair the builder with that homeowner to execute the project. So taking our different buckets of clients and figuring out how to intertwine them so they can all benefit from one another. And I think that's the end goal is to have this comprehensive ecosystem to not only where you can go to get the tools but, but, but you can benefit with it without having to do any work, is getting, getting great leads and, and, and all this different stuff. So that, that's, that's where we see it all trending to. That's what our vision is.

And, and just having great recommended bel builders and contractors. And you know, it's crazy. And again that all started because the amount of clients that they finished, they're like, great, I love this. Do you know anybody that can do it for me? You know, and it's like, ah, you know, and so it's again, everything is happening organically. We're not trying to force anything. We really are just listening to everybody and our clients and if it happens enough and then here we are. But with that being said, there's just a tremendous, there's so many holes in the building and design process. It's so many different professionals that are involved, but not one leader, not one authority. And it's just kind of a mess. And if you talk to anybody that builds a house, I mean everyone will say the exact same thing. It's an absolute nightmare. And so to be able to do that and with confidence and go even if you just wanted a little addition or a portico built or dormer or whatever and you know, you came through designly, that's where you got your design, that's where you got your contractor, that's. And then you're happy. You know, everyone's happy and confident and also too with the professionals. They have amazing and great leads where they're not even trying to sell it. These people are like help me. And designly said you could, you know, so it's a win, win for everybody.

Yeah, I'm sure there's a few builders out there that are like the sound of that. Because quality is one of the biggest challenges in the industry at the moment.

Yes, yes. But then not only that, what better lead? Not only do we give you that the lead, but then we give you the quantities, the construction drawings. I mean it doesn't get any better than that.

Well, very excited to see where things go. I think this, I mean this is the future of designing homes, I think powered by technology. So great to hear what you guys are up to and really appreciate you coming on the show today. Where's the best place for people to go next? To find out more designly.com designly.com D.

Z I N L Y Beautiful.

Well, we'll include a link to that in the show notes, but Jackie, Matt, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Thanks so much for sharing your expertise and everything, all the cool stuff you're doing at Designly to help out builders.

Thanks. Well, thank you for having us.

Cool. And also a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builders Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus Root will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you Precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.